


Crimson

by acedavestrider



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, M/M, dead bodies, nothing too bad but some descriptions of blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-16 20:36:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16502276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acedavestrider/pseuds/acedavestrider
Summary: You stumble upon the dead doomed bodies of you and your boyfriend, and spiral.





	Crimson

**Author's Note:**

> local author has no idea how doomed timelines/time travel works, writes fic about it anyways

You see it before Karkat does. Blood, dripping around a corner into the hallway, scares you into nearly stopping mid-step. You know exactly where it’s coming from. Karkat hasn’t seen it yet.

You’re taking a walk together down the long corridors of the meteor station. Being around the others can be overwhelming at times, especially with the way Rose has been acting lately. The road to alcoholism is a long one, followed by several more, equally long roads of denial and recovery, and she’s stumbling down the street with a bottle of booze in her hand and not a care in the fucking world. You don’t like to think about it much; it reminds you too much of your own ability to fall into the same patterns as your guardian. 

Karkat doesn’t see the blood. You keep walking as if nothing is wrong, trying to think of something to say to stop him from rounding the corner. The hallway turns at a sharp angle; there’s nowhere else to go, no other fork in the hall to turn to. You’re trying to think but your brain is foggy from just the sight of the red liquid, creeping towards you as it gathers on the floor. 

You’ve been doing so well. Karkat, too. Seeing candy red blood, pooling into an unsettling puddle on the floor, would be so detrimental to the progress he’s made in the last two years. And it would be your fault. 

Karkat hasn’t seen it yet. You turn to him suddenly, flinging an unrehearsed and awkward hand onto his shoulder. You’re still not entirely comfortable with affection and the addition of trying to stop your whole body from shaking doesn’t make the movement any less disjointed. 

“Hey you know what I just realized?” you say, a bit too loud.

“Enlighten me with your overflowing wisdom, Dave,” Karkat snarks back at you. You can tell he’s startled by the fact that you touched him at all, with no provocation. You try to steer his body to face yours, away from the blood. 

“ _ Fuck  _ this hallway,” you say with a wide gesture. “And fuck walking in it.” 

Karkat, sleepy and insomniatic as usual, doesn’t seem to have the energy to question what the hell you’re talking about. He just looks at you with a raised eyebrow, asking for an explanation. 

Your hand is still on his shoulder and you gesture with your other. “This hallway is just like the forty billion we’ve already walked through. It’s like the worst horror game ever designed. I can just hear my free stock footage footstep sound effects echoing off the walls like we’re stuck inside a tin can. Do you hear that, Karkat? That’s the sound of the shitty YouTuber playing this game logging the fuck off and going outside for once, because that’s how terrible it is.” 

“What in the sweet shitting fuck is a YouTuber?” 

“It’s someone who has no direction in life and if even they don’t wanna play this game then we should quit too, return that shit to GameStop and get back our fourteen ninety-nine so we can buy something worth our time. Like Tony Hawk.” 

Karkat hasn’t seen it yet. He’s too busy looking at you, just as he had been when you’d first walked this way. 

“If you don’t wanna walk around anymore you can just say so,” he says. “I’m not sure if you know this but not everything you say has to be a long-winded metaphor about vapid earth shit that no one knows or cares about.” His tone is good natured, and the little smile at the corner of his mouth sends relief into your stomach. He hasn’t seen it. 

“Says the absolute reigning champion of long-winded metaphors about random fucking shit,” you retort. “Half the time I don’t even know what the fuck you’re saying.” 

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Dave.” 

“Let’s just go back to your room and watch one of those shitty movies you like,” you suggest. “I’ll even pick one out. Let’s go with ‘In Which Some Fucking Loser and a Second Loser, Both Equally Bad at Acting, Pretend to Have Any Sort of Chemistry and Awkwardly Makeout With

Each Other For Forty-Eight Minutes, Meanwhile a Third Loser Gets Butthurt About Said Makeouts And--’”

“Okay, Jesus, if I say yes will you shut your fucking protein shute?”

“Absolutely.” 

Karkat rolls his eyes, sending you into a momentary lapse of panic on the off chance that he might catch the blood in his peripheral vision. He doesn’t. He starts to walk away put pauses when you don’t follow. 

“I thought you wanted to get out of this apparently shitty and poorly designed hallway,” he says impatiently. 

“Yeah,” you say. “But I’m full of piss right now, won’t be able to make it back without getting piss everywhere. And that’s the last thing this hallway needs. Think there’s a bathroom or something around here somewhere.” 

“Okay, yeah, I don’t really want to see you piss yourself.” 

You’re taking too long to respond so Karkat just waves you away, insisting that you go relieve yourself. You promise to meet him back in his room. 

“If I’m not back in twenty minutes I’m either hopelessly lost and have succumbed to the inner machinations of the meteor or your clown friend killed me. Don’t mourn me. Move on with your life. Follow your dreams and always keep me in your memories.” 

“I thought you had to pee?” 

You shoot finger guns at him. “Right, later.” 

You turn around to leave but look behind you to watch Karkat go. He doesn’t see it. 

When you’re sure he’s gone you sprint to the end of the hallway and to the turn, gliding a little bit in between steps, nearly taking off. You follow the trail of blood to its source and it’s exactly what you expected. 

It’s your dead bodies. You and Karkat. Your blood has mixed together in a larger pool near your corpses, still red but too sickly sweet in color to just be human. 

It’s been a long time since you’ve dealt with bodies. Dead ones. Yours. The time loops have been stable enough lately that the most you’ve seen is a different version of yourself occasionally darting around a corner. The tail end of a red cape catches your eye sometimes but the other Daves are normally harmless. You end up being some of them sometimes anyways. 

You don’t want to know what happened here. You have a couple guesses based on the various, bloody wounds, but it’s best not to speculate about doomed timelines. It only leads to trying to fix them, and inevitably you just create more. More doomed timelines means more dead Daves. More dead Karkats. The best thing you can focus on is that the current version of you and Karkat probably won’t become the corpses in front of you. You would have felt it. You would have known. 

You gag a little at the smell as you get closer. It’s really a lot of blood and you’ve lost the tolerance you’d built up from strifing back home. You really don’t want to think about strifing right now. Or Bro. Or home. 

If you don’t get your head out of your ass you’re gonna break down into a panic attack and be gone for too long, and then Karkat will be suspicious and you’ll have to come up with another shitty excuse for why you took so long and you don’t know if you have it in you to spew any more bullshit at him and - 

You need to calm down. 

Before Rose started going down the winding and treacherous road of alcohol dependency, she did her typical psychoanalyst bullshit and tried to get to the route of your panic attacks. They were really bad the first year on the meteor, to the point where you weren’t eating, sleeping, or leaving your room for days. The fucking dream bubbles, popped from the mouths of the horrorterrors in the furthest ring like spit bubbles from an Eldritch toddler, didn’t make anything easier. Jolting awake and being in your old apartment, with the memory of your brother looming over you, was enough to send you into a spiral for days. 

To try to get your attacks under control, Rose suggested a coping mechanism to help you ground yourself. She instructed you to focus on your senses, and think about one thing you can hear, see, smell, taste, and touch. You take a deep breath. 

You can hear your heartbeat, pounding in your ears. 

You can smell blood all around you, the scent soaking into your clothes, your skin.  

You can taste bile in your throat, choking you. 

This is not helping. Rose’s good for nothing pseudo-therapy bullshit has failed you once again. 

You need to get rid of the bodies. The longer you stand here the longer the bodies lay nearby, becoming more rancid and daunting. You take a moment to steel yourself, and push back the lump in your throat with a hard swallow before approaching the corpses. 

One of the benefits of having god tier powers, besides flying, is that the sick pajamas you got after ascending are magic - they don’t get dirty. You should know, you’ve gone days without moving or showering during your worst episodes, and not a drop of sweat, grease, or poorly alchemized food has stained your precious pj’s. You pull the sleeves of your shirt over your hands and get to work. 

It takes a while. You actually consider just captchaloging them and calling it a day, but you know future you won’t appreciate the fucking shitshow that would be left for him so you decide against it. You end up dragging the bodies over to the nearest transportalizer, and find yourself in a room with a trash shoot. The option is tempting, but the shoot likely goes off the meteor and the image of your dead bodies, frozen and stiff, floating past your bedroom window prevents you from taking the plunge. In fact, you’ve had a very vivid nightmare about just that. 

There’s some weird equipment in the room that looks vaguely ectobiological. You recall John having a breakdown about slime over Pesterchum what seems like years ago, and your experiences with helping Jade find the genesis frog has given you a fair amount of slime-related knowledge. You pull the bodies onto the platform and fuck around with some dials and buttons until they’re reduced to green sludge and sucked into the nearby tubes. There are eight more tubes attached to the machine, and anyone coming across them will likely chalk up the two filled tubes to shenanigans and move on. You’re pretty sure the other ones have to be filled for anything to happen, and pray to whatever fucking deity has pulled this sick joke of an existence on you that you don’t face any major consequences because of this. 

You frantically check your hands as you power walk back to the center of the meteor, where Karkat’s room is. There’s no blood on them, but you keep rubbing them nervously on your pants. Everytime you look you swear you see flashes of crimson flicker in and out of existence on your palms. You were expecting some kind of relief when you got rid of the bodies, but you feel the same. You feel worse. You’re sweating. Is your heart pounding because you’re basically sprinting down the hallway or because you’re about to have an anxiety attack? How long have you been gone? Is Karkat going to question you when you get back? Is he worried? 

Upon arriving back at his room and taking a moment to catch your breath, you find that he’s actually asleep. The menu screen for a generic romantic-comedy is playing on a loop on the TV and Karkat is sound asleep in a nest of overly fluffy pillows on his bed. You almost sigh in relief at the sight but think better of making noise and hold back the urge. 

You join him on the bed, laying down stiffly next to his curled up form. The bridge of your shades has started to hurt your nose, so you take them off, flinging them off the side of the bed. Despite the dead corpses of you and your kind of boyfriend being long gone, you’re body still aches for comfort, some sort of relief from your pent up anxiety. You scoot closer to Karkat as quietly as you can, worried about waking him, and put a hand on his hip. You align your bodies so you can rest your forehead against his back, settling into a comfortable position and falling asleep within a few minutes. 

Neither of you wake up for another hour, both too sleep-deprived during the night to avoid sleeping during the day. Karkat eventually stirs awake with a deep rumble in his chest, stretching out and bumping you with his elbows. When he turns to you, his form blurry in your sleep-filled eyes, he gives you a grumpy look. 

“Do all humans take that fucking long in the load gaper or is it just you?” he grumbles. 

Your chest squeezes uncomfortably, the sudden reminder of what you had to do before your impromptu nap coming back to hit you like a meteor hurtling through space at a million miles an hour. You try to play it off as best as you can, the slight tremor in your voice likely imperceptible to anyone but you. 

“Dude, you’re seriously asking me what I do in the bathroom?” you ask. “Talk about a fucking invasion of privacy.” 

“You took so long I think I aged six sweeps while you were gone,” he retorts. “I molted twice and now we’ve arrived at the new session, except you missed the opportunity to join us and we beat Lord English without you. That’s how long you took.” 

“How would you even know how long I took? You conked the fuck out while I was gone.” 

“Yeah, because you took so goddamn long!” 

Karkat sits up with a shake of his head, rubbing sleep out of his eyes and pushing his fingers through his curly hair. You just watch him, half in admiration and half in fear. You check your hands again, trying to be discreet, looking for any blood that might have gotten on them. Your stomach turns, doing acrobatic pirouettes inside you, and you swallow down bile. 

“Don’t think you’ve gotten out of watching this movie,” Karkat reminds you, rooting around in the bed for the lost TV remote. The menu music is still playing on a loop. “I picked out a really good romance film.” 

“That’s an oxymoron,” you say, sitting up as well. 

“Shut the fuck up and prepare to eat your words.” 

He presses a few buttons and the opening theme of the movie starts, blaring violin music over the speakers. You pay attention to the movie even less than you normally would, the roiling of your stomach distracting you. To curb your nausea you press into Karkat’s side, dropping your head into his shoulder to take in his scent, trying to fill your senses with him instead of blood and dead bodies. He puts an arm around you, still a little hesitant, and you feel yourself relax, if only a little. 

Normally the amount of snark you and Karkat throw at each other during movies would be off the charts, but you’re both too tired to say much. You only make a few throwaway comments about the poor acting and shitty plot, staying quiet through most of the film. You suffer through not one but two awkward sex scenes, one red and the other black, while Karkat watches along intently. He looks at you a lot, turning to face you full on when the movie ends, jostling you from your comfortable spot against him. 

“I know you probably hated the movie so don’t even bother pointing out every issue you had with it,” he says. 

“It wasn’t that bad,” you say. “Actually it was so bad that it was kind of good? Like that scene with the lowblood dude and the chick with the big tits on the beach? That shit was genius.” 

“Of course you liked  _ that _ scene,” Karkat says with a shake of his head. “It was so obviously added in for people like you who can’t understand the beauty and depth of a movie without asinine drivel like that being included.” 

“I’m wounded dude,” you say with a hand on your chest. “My taste in movies is  _ impeccable,  _ okay? Don’t even get me started.” 

“Oh, I fucking won’t,” Karkat says. “The amount of absurd, mind-numbing hoofbeast shit I’ve heard come out of your mouth in the last sweep is enough to last anyone a lifetime. My shit quotas are out of this world, completely unparalleled in the shit industry, because I’ve had to listen to all of the imprudent garbage that cascades out of your mouth like the nastiest word vomit nearly every day. I’m truly drowning in shit, the stench is unbearable and I’m beginning to lose consciousness. I pray everyday that it will eventually kill me so I can be free of the prison that is your opinion on literally anything.” 

“Dude, you’re so sweet, waxing poetic about me,” you joke, though something is still swirling uncomfortably in your stomach. You clamp down on it and swallow thickly, trying to push bile back down your throat while keeping your tone light. “Should I tell you all the things I like about you too? We can have a feelings jam and get real fucking gay in here.” 

Karkat rolls his eyes at your human terminology, which he has insisted several times is asinine, useless, and unnecessary. You mention human sexuality as much as possible just to annoy him, and it always works. 

Karkat leans back against the wall and changes the TV to a recording of troll Fresh Prince and you welcome the silence you settle into. You try to respond to Karkat when he makes inquiries here and there about the show, or makes an offhand comment about something, but every time you speak you can feel vomit sneaking up your throat. You put your head on Karkat’s shoulder and will your nausea away, along with the leftover image of your dead bodies. Their outlines are burned into the backs of your eyelids, and each time you blink you seem crimson, dripping and pooling onto the floor. You swallow. 

An arm slinks around your waist after a couple episodes, and you welcome the pressure. A few more minutes and hesitant fingers drift to yours as Karkat silently tries to work out how willing you are to receive affection today. You want to scream at him to please hold you, touch you, do anything to push away the feeling of dread still encapsulating your body, but you can’t get yourself to speak. You press closer to him instead and that seems to give him the assurance necessary to fully commit to holding your hand. You squeeze his hand in yours, but the nausea continues to roll over you, waves of it crashing onto your chest and in your throat. Your heart beat speeds up, and you can’t tell if it’s because of your proximity to Karkat or because of the bodies still flashing red in your mind. 

Karkat’s soft hands play absently with your fingers, but it does nothing to calm your frayed nerves. He turns to you after a while and you look at him, hoping he doesn’t see the fear and stress in your eyes. His gaze doesn’t meet yours and instead he looks down at your lips with a hesitant frown. His eyes flick to yours, but only for a second. 

“Can I…” he starts quietly. He pauses then starts again, huffing. “I know you said that kissing stuff is still weird for you and that I have to ask when I want to try it, so this is me asking. Please don’t make me speak anymore for both of our sakes.” 

Your response consists of leaning forward and pressing your mouth to his. Karkat’s lips ground you when they meet yours, and you press into him more than you usually do. He’s right that kissing still freaks you out a little bit, the remnants of your homophobic upbringing still rising to the surface on occasion, but this time you need it, you need something, someone, to keep you from completely freaking out.

Karkat’s hand finds your waist as he makes a surprised noise in the back of his throat at your unusual enthusiasm. You kiss him, and the nausea curling in your stomach turns to pleasant butterflies. You kiss him, and the bile in your throat is replaced with breathlessness. You kiss him, and the tightness in your chest turns to warmth. You kiss him, and you feel safe.

**Author's Note:**

> started this in april and only just now finished it. not my best work by a long shot but thought id give it a chance and post it regardless. 
> 
> thanks for reading, leave a comment if you feel like it 
> 
> also happy nanowrimo and good luck to anyone participating, you can do it


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